


Sunk Costs

by OxfordOctopus



Series: OxfordOctopus' Snips'n'Snaps [11]
Category: Parahumans Series - Wildbow
Genre: Abduction, Aftermath of Violence, Altered Mental States, Gangs, Gen, Implied/Referenced Abuse, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Multitrigger, Non-Consensual Drug Use, Sexual Harassment
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-27
Updated: 2019-07-27
Packaged: 2020-07-23 05:36:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,230
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20003158
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OxfordOctopus/pseuds/OxfordOctopus
Summary: Taylor wakes up in a merchant party as a fresh trigger of a cluster.(thanks to t0ph4t for helping with the powers and themes n shit.)





	Sunk Costs

She should have listened to her father. It’d been such a rough week, they’d been low on food - not even Kurt and Lacey had been able to encourage them to look towards the future - and the gangs had gotten worse, pushed harder against the area they’d ended up in. So she went out, she stumbled over the ruins and decay of a city hit by Leviathan, all waterlogged and broken, in search for non-perishables. Anything to help, she had told herself, anything at all.

But then again, those were all background thoughts.

Most things had become background thoughts, after they’d stuck that needle in her shoulder. But that was both in the future and still somehow in the past - she felt like she was forgetting something, something so important her life felt trivial in contrast - a chorus of background memories and thoughts boiling together, producing abstracted emotions to accompany them. Things had gotten worse, you know? It was hard to remember what was worse about it or why, but she’d recalled the fear of being lost in the dark, that her indistinct form would be swallowed up by the haze and the high and the bodies of people who sneered instead of smiled. That she’d no longer be _her_ , but a shadow, her very being undone and grafted back over something _wrong_.

The concrete felt soft against her hands, somehow. The heel of her shoe helped keep her stable as she rose, the woozy shift and pitch of the world hard to make out against the _rawness_ of that past feeling, of that not knowing, as though her heart had somehow forgotten how to beat. The world around her was a blanket of gloom and shade, shifting as neons cut through the crowd. They’d pulled away from her for some reason, leaving a few meters space between herself and the smushed-together onlookers.

She stared at them, and they stared back in turn. She knew something had changed but the haze was only now lifting, only now scraping her away from that feeling of coming undone. Who were they? Where were they? Things she didn’t ask before - didn’t _need_ to - burbled up, spilling out of the shattered gaps that had only recently just been filled. Detachment, dissociation, things that had helped push her away from the moment, to make the trauma indistinct from the venue, peeled back.

She knew.

 _Taylor_ knew.

“Oh, _shit_.” One among the crowd spoke, his voice somewhere between mirth and nervousness. “Somebody go find Skids – we got ourselves another _recruit_.”

The group roared, a sound of triumph. For what? What did they believe she would be for them? Taylor looked down at her hands, finding herself briefly speechless as fingers of dark blue, cuffed by ice-white clothing, looked back up at her. As far as she could tell, colors had been inverted, whites to black, blacks to white, with tinges of blues spread throughout. It made her stand sharp against the surroundings, unavoidably _there_. She noticed that, too, the way light didn’t really trace against her body, wearing shading that she now knew was false, tattooed onto her changed skin like a brand.

She glanced back up, the crowd returning to its festivities, eyes sliding over to her whenever they could. Someone walked forward, a smile playing at his withered lips, pale-olive skin stretched like leather over a too-sharp skeleton. A hand extended out to grab her, to take her shoulder, to do _something to her_.

Taylor intercepted the hand with her own, the man’s face splitting first into a wide smile, and then into something close to agony when, instinctively, she _clenched_.

She felt the effect – amplified, somehow, some part of her whispering about how he stood out against her, how that was _important_. She felt when his knuckles popped like bubble-wrap, felt as the bones that made up his fingers were flattened and ground down into mulch. His scream was long and horrified while he tried desperately to pull his hand away.

She simply _held_ , feeling the way the world was so very responsive to her actions.

Weirdly, another part of the world felt uniquely like an empty hole, or the possibility of one, a vacancy that was everywhere but never too far from her, as though someone had turned reality into a 4-dimensional Connect Four board. She felt her ability to notice it waver first and then begin to solidify, or perhaps become more distinct against the hum of noise in her head. Something else murmured quietly in her ear, yet the disconnect in her head kept it from being something she could understand, all muffled and smothered by cotton.

A bat landed against her shoulder, eliciting the same sort of pain that stumbling against the corner of a wall might. She quickly reeled on the one with the bat, letting go of the hand and wildly throwing her clenched fist out in an arc. She saw the dim recognition in her attacker’s face as her fist met the flesh of his shoulder, the shape deforming; caving in like a kicked aluminum can. The bat fell, rattling to the floor, as the man let out a wail of pitched agony, thrown back far further and with far more of an impact than should be possible.

The crowd stirred, nervous and desperate. She drew her gaze towards it and watched as the front line wavered, buckling beneath her curiosity. Someone let out a broken sob, others simply tried to get away, trying to push through the wall of bodies, though most simply stared back, eyes too glazed to understand what to do besides stand around. The tension in the air was palpable, so much that even the most drugged out of the group started to get nervous the longer she kept her stare.

Then, with no preamble, no chance to _expect_ anything, half of the lights in the building flickered and something exploded. Like a starting pistol the crowd broke, a scramble of limbs and fearful wails as the sound of fighting cut through the din of music and moving bodies. By the time she’d recovered from the shock, only she and the one person she’d broken the shoulder of were left, with her wounded attacker watery-eyed and looking as though he was unable to stand, let alone run.

At the far end of the room, a lick of flame sputtered through the air. Someone hit the ground with a wet _splut_ , accompanied by a spatter of clear fluid spilling over into sight. The noise of conflict kicked up, accompanied by the rattling crack of a gunshot.

Something deep and miserable curled in the pit of her stomach. A scatter of surface memories pushed out through the loosening fog in her mind, a reminder of how she ended up here. Taylor’s fingers found the hilt of the bat, folding around it with a quiet sort of reverie, watching as the oily-black steel flickered once, twice, thrice, and then turned icy white in color, her power spreading and seeping into it.

She levelled her eyes with her attacker’s. The prone man whimpered, legs kicking out as he tried - and failed - to create some distance.

Her feet made a sort of distorted reverb as they hit the ground. At her approach, the downed man managed to scramble to a stand, still clutching one shoulder. He tumbled over his own shoes, hissing as he bounced against the wall, but still made an effort to run.

She tugged on the part of her that felt the world as potential gaps. She leaned on it, let the connection grow focused, narrowing down to a single hole just behind the man’s knees, and _wrenched_.

There was an explosion of ivory mist and neon-green electricity, small and inadequate, barely the size of a softball, yet with a strong enough pulling force that she stumbled over her own toes. The man she aimed at was worse off, his head cracking against the concrete as his legs were wrenched out from under him. The noise got louder. Someone, somewhere, was screaming a list of profanities.

The feeling in her belly hadn’t gotten any better, it’d gotten even somewhat worse. Anger dribbled out from the misery, pushing her to move, to keep her gait steady even if she had to keep the bat limp at her side, scraping it along the concrete. The feeling pushed up and clustered in her throat, thick and clear enough that she swallowed, trying to banish the sensation of being choked, of being forced to go in certain directions, of being drugged and unable to move yet horrifyingly _still fucking aware_.

Taylor’s fingers tightened around the bat as she raised it, taking a two handed grip. She balanced it behind the crown of her head, the whirl of hatred in her ears becoming so pronounced, so overwhelming.

“I won’t stop you.” The words, spoken from what looked to be a bipedal salamander, were cautious. “But, please – seriously, consider what you’re about to do.”

Letting her eyes linger on the approaching cape, she noticed that he wasn’t alone. A tall woman wearing a welder’s mask and an outfit somewhere between a bulletproof vest and an engineer’s uniform stood off to the side, pulling a quilt tight around a whimpering, teary-eyed girl wearing the tatters of a shirt. Behind her was a woman in full green talking to a particularly large man made out of shaped gelatin and bone, a poorly dressed teenage boy with glowing eyes, ears, and nose trailing awkwardly behind. She noticed, too, that the world was quiet, that the ringing she felt was receding and all she could hear now was her own breath, sounding deep and synthetic, as well as the whimpers and sobs of her attacker.

Taylor’s posture drooped, her legs crumpling backwards as a swell of nausea and something awful filled her head. The bat fell away, returning to normal as it hit the ground and she took in just what she was about to do, what she was desperate to do. The memories were still fragmented, still like so much broken glass clenched against her palm.

Nobody made to approach her victim, but the salamander-cape did approach her, if only by a few steps. “Do you know if you can deactivate your—” he made a general motion “—this?”

“Why?” She didn’t like that this was her first response, that she lashed out, that she was so desperate for anything at all that kept the people and the bodies away. “Does it have to go off?”

Salamander shook his head, hands raised up beside his head. “It doesn’t, but Breakers – well.” He faltered, glancing back towards Welder’s Mask, the woman nodding once before stepping forward.

“Breaker states are very often mentally... incapacitating.” Welder’s Mask’s voice was as gentle as Salamanders, though a bit firmer, a bit less willing to put up with her. It felt somehow chastising. “So you may be able to calm down if you leave it, but there’s other things in play that worry us.”

Reaching into herself, she did find something. It couldn’t quite be called a switch, not really, but maybe the metaphysical representation of a dial or something, something with _give_. If she just _pushed_ it—

—she felt the intensity leave her more than she saw it, felt the way the world was less receptive to her actions, more leaded and heavy. Her head spun, unhappy about the strength bubbling out of her, a connection to the world she didn’t know she had blinking out of existence—

A hand came to rest against her back, apparently catching her before she could fall. She looked down at herself, saw the way the light - and lack thereof - painted her, how her skin was back to that lifeless pallor and how her hair, gritty as it was, clung to the side of her face, black and tangled. A breath of nervousness bubbled up and out of her, ferried on and up with a manic little giggle, a worry she didn’t know she’d had finally being put to rest.

The moment she was steady on her feet, the hand wrenched away as though it’d been burned. The hand in question was from the teary-eyed girl she’d seen before, her own eyes as bewildered as Taylor actually felt in that moment. When they locked eyes, the other girl shuddered, reaching down to pull her blanket back up and against the scraps of cloth that had once been a pretty good quality sweater. A stiff, half-tense, half-awkward atmosphere filled into the gaps where her social graces had been, and she felt herself retreating a step away from the girl, putting another few feet between them.

The crowd of parahumans - of the people who saved her, she knew - stirred uncomfortably, glancing nervously between them. Welder’s Mask leaned over to mumble something to the ginger in green, who responded to whatever was said with an uneasy grunt before walking away. Out of the corner of her eye, Taylor saw her tug a phone out, though what it was being used for was beyond her, the figure vanishing behind the corner of a wall.

The ratty boy, eyes all white and flickering, separated from the group of parahumans and carefully started to walk over, his arms pulled tight against his abdomen. He looked defensive, nervous in the sort of way that meant he expected violence for something, somehow. Maybe his actions were a consequence of the trauma, maybe they were just that he was nervous in ways that others didn’t understand, his own form of coping being in that of standoffs, but whatever the reason was it certainly didn’t reflect well on him.

His mouth opened once, paused, and then shut with a _click_.

“So.” Blanket girl was the first one to speak, her voice an uneasy waver. “I – I, uhm. Wonder what’s going to happen to us?”

Taylor thinned her lips. The boy imitated the gesture, somehow ruining it.

“I’m, uhm. They told me to – well, to, er.” The girl fidgeted, her voice growing fainter at the reception. She felt a twinge of something uneasy crawl up her throat. “Choose a name – for the, y’know, things.”

“Skids—” the word brought a sharp dip to her lips, though she smoothed her expression out before the teenage boy caught on “—uh, called me, like, Rubber? After the, y’know, eraser and the condom.”

“We’ll call you Eraser, then.” Welder’s Mask had approached, still looking stiff and uncomfortable. She spared a glance at the newly dubbed Eraser, and the teen all but crumpled beneath the stare. “We had three triggers. We found Eraser first, then her—” she made a motion towards blanket girl “—and then finally found her—” Taylor felt herself wilt under the focus and jab of a finger “—near the back.”

Ginger-in-green - she really had to find out their names sometime, it was getting difficult to keep track of them - had returned, the exposed parts of her face pulled into a tight grimace, her phone clenched in one hand like a stress ball. Welder’s Mask glanced back at the cape before making a dismissive motion with one hand, prompting them to go back to the large gelatin creature.

“We called someone, a – well, not a friend, but an acquaintance, who might have a stronger grasp on what’s going on. They spoke to us limitedly about what this might be, and with that in mind I think we should have a discussion.” Everyone’s eyes, even the other creatures and capes that’d clustered around, were on Welder’s Mask. “I’m not sure what exactly it means for this to have happened. My exploration of this sort of thing has been relegated towards Case 53s, but I do have enough of a background to understand some of what’s going on. You don’t have to, but I’m going to ask that you three say out loud what your powers are.”

There was a short, smothering sort of pause. Eraser shuffled awkwardly in place, blanket girl looked deeply uncomfortable with speaking in front of an audience, and Taylor personally had the implicit urge to run, to turn on her heel and make for the nearest exit as soon as humanly possible. It wasn’t exactly a pressing impulse, sure, but it was there, nervous and energetic in a way that told her she probably shouldn’t listen to it.

“I, uhm.” Among the people here, Taylor hadn’t expected blanket girl to speak up first. She did though, nervous all the while. “I don’t get hit by things, I can sort of—” her blanket flickered, the color distorting into something vividly reminiscent of Taylor’s other form, if only abstractly, the colors a bit different, less touched by blues “—do this to objects. I’m not sure what it does. And I can make portals.” The blanket’s coloration reverted, settling back against her body.

Eraser made a nervous noise, his empty, glowing eyes tracing the air around him. Eventually, with what looked to be resignation, he nodded his head in a jerky spasm. “I can make explosions. I think, they’re sort of like, displacing things? I can’t explain it. They go through everything. I think. I’m also kinda able to see when shit’s out of place, things and like, light? It’s colored kinda similar to how the blanket was. I can’t really explain that either.” He paused, wrinkling his nose after a moment. “I also kinda feel like people lost track of me easier? Which is difficult since, y’know.” He made a gesture towards his face. Salamander let out a mirthful snort.

All eyes turned to Taylor. She felt herself bunch up a bit, her spine going ramrod straight and the urge to bristle against the attention pulsing like something heavy and angry in her head. She swallowed the urge down, glanced at blanket girl - who looked not nervous, but worried? - and then back towards the crowd. “I can turn into – into whatever I was before. I felt like it had something to do with how other things compared to me, how I stood out against them. I also sort of – well, it’s harder to feel now, but I can somewhat feel like, gaps in everything? It’s like swiss cheese, but not. I can tug on those to make what I think was a vacuum in that area? It came with a weird explosion.” Taylor paused, her brows furrowing as she tried to think, glad that the haze was gone. Something was missing, she felt, something – something relatively important. “There’s something else,” she concluded after leaving them in silence. “But I couldn’t tell you what it was, only that it’s there and it’s bothering me.”

That seemed to placate the crowd, especially Welder’s Mask. The woman rocked back on her heels, and even with the slab of metal over her face, she could imagine the pensive, interested look hidden below. Curiosity warred with her need to go away, to be anyplace else but in the mall. She wanted to know, wanted to know why that was necessary, why they were waiting for someone and why this had happened to her. Yet, she also wanted to hide, to pretend none of this was real and that she didn’t feel the crash of something in her system, drugs they’d pumped her full of an—

Taylor breathed out, catching some looks for it. _Don’t focus on that_ , she recited, going over the small amount of advice she’d gotten from a two-session therapist after the locker. _Remember that you’re here, in the moment, and breathe_.

“This is less than ideal.” Welder’s Mask spoke slowly, but not quite soothingly. “But I have an offer to make: you can join us, we can hash out the details over the next few hours, and decide from there. You’d be able to leave whenever, and I’m going to state this very clearly: we won't force you to stay. You’ll have a safe place, a team, and somewhere to explore how your powers work.”

Distantly, she could hear the wail of alarms.

“The other option is to stay here.” Welder’s Mask glanced over towards what looked to be a decimated fire exit. “The PRT will likely be here within five to ten minutes. They can offer you just as much safety as we can, as well as answers for the questions you have. I don’t know everything about what I’m starting to believe is your situation, and I only know the abstracts because Shamrock told me about it after you three triggered. I’m more than willing to help you find out what you need to know about them and work through those problems.”

Eraser, within seconds, had retreated back towards Welder’s Mask. “I can’t go with the PRT,” he said quickly, for the first time showing something other than his normal disjointed self. “Former Merchant and all that. I’ll be in chains and packed away before I can ask for a lawyer.”

Taylor’s opinion of Eraser, already pretty bad, withered at his explanation. At least her hunch was justified and it wasn’t her just being weird.

_Fucking Merchants._

“Uhm.” Blanket girl stumbled up to Taylor’s side, staring awkwardly at her. “Where are you thinking?”

Taylor let herself think for a moment. Now that Eraser was with Welder’s Mask, she couldn’t quite bring herself to take the masked hero up on her offer. Something about it stank, something about most of that _situation_ stank, and the source wasn’t likely to only be Eraser.

“I’ll stay,” Taylor said, feeling the finality of that statement both in her tone and in the way she relaxed, acknowledging that things were going to be this way. “I’ll have to, I can’t – can’t go with him, not with his background.”

Eraser, to his credit, didn’t snarl, but the expression on his face all but mirrored it. He jerked around and stormed off towards Gelatin, his feet stomping hard as he stalked off. Welder’s Mask’s posture radiated a certain sort of disappointment, somewhere between a mother and a manager, but it also didn’t seem like she was about to question her choice. Who would, really? She was here because of the Merchants, and she wasn’t about to stick around to become stupid fucking _buddy-buddy_ with one either.

Welder’s Mask came forward after a moment, brandishing a card. On it was ‘FAULTLINE’, written in simple, blocky letters, a line cutting through the center, separating the top and bottom half just enough for it to be noticeable. “If you ever need anything, please call.” She took the card, moving it to the dirt-rimmed pockets at her side. “Both of you, even.”

At that comment, Taylor glanced at the other girl. She looked back, her posture relaxing a breath. “I’m staying,” blanket girl all but whispered, tucking a bit further behind, as though she was about to hide behind her back. “Thank you.”

Faultline sighed behind her mask, the noise tinged by the metal. “Right. Gregor, Newter, Shamrock, Eraser, let’s go. Spitfire’s waiting on us.”

Taylor watched them leave, their figures passing through the fire exit without looking back. The wail of alarm grew louder, rattling throughout the building now.

Blanket girl spoke up again, her eyes cast to the side. “Hey, uhm, I’m Charlotte, by the way.”

Pursing her lips, Taylor inclined her head. “Taylor.”

The other girl hitched a little, a nervous spasm running through one hand. “I know,” she clarified, whisper-quiet. “I went to Winslow, I know, Taylor. I’m sorry.”

Charlotte’s head was tilted down, her face unreadable at that angle. Taylor felt, again, like there was something missing there, that she should be eager to lash out, to hurt Charlotte for being in Winslow. She’d promised herself _never again_ , to never bring herself to be around them, to share any of her life with the people who'd ignored her and let her suffer. Surely, against all of this, a backdrop of decay, of roaring sirens and the damage left over by Leviathan, _surely_ she should feel bothered, feel _wronged_ by it all.

Instead, her hand brushed over Charlotte’s head once, twice. Three times. A gesture her father - and mother, before she died - had used to help soothe her when she felt guilty. She hoped the action translated well enough – that it carried her forgiveness - or maybe lack of hatred - and intent to comfort.

Charlotte’s hug, pulled tight against her ribs with her face pressed hard against her collarbone, told her that the message had gotten across well enough. The smaller, brown-haired girl started to cry, vivid little hics and gasps for air, sobs rolling out while tears wet the collar of her sweater.

The distant edge of her vision filled with officers wearing blue, a white PRT logo written large against their chests. They wore assault rifles, though they weren’t aimed up, which was a small blessing. They were flanked on the left side by a man in full blue armor and two tagalongs, one a girl in full white with her hood pulled tight against her head, and the other a boy with blue hair, his arm covered by a large round shield. Lagging slightly behind was a woman in full green fatigues, wearing a colorful flag of america over the bottom half of her face, her hands occupied by a large automatic gun of some kind.

With little else to do, Taylor waited.


End file.
